This past week Andy Carl and I joined the international NGO Christian Aid Ireland team in Dublin to reflect on progress in a key feature of their work - adaptive programming. This post presents what Andy Carl and I learned in reflecting this week with the international NGO Christian Aid Ireland regarding a key feature of their work - adaptive programming. We also provide some slides, that present metaphors and examples methods of adaptive programming that we have not presented before.

In this blog, Peace Direct intern Celia Carbajosa spoke to leading social entrepreneur, activist and Rotary Peace Fellow Maria Gabriela Arenas- or ‘Gaby’ as she goes by- about an approach to violence which she thinks is largely overlooked: that of visual arts and innovative education. Gaby is the founder of TAAP (“Taller de Aprendizaje para las Artes y el Pensamiento”), a foundation based on promoting peaceful living and learning through creative workshops. TAPP uses drawings, photography, videos, textiles, sculptures and other tools to stimulate children, parents and the wider community to change how they think about violence and come up with communal solutions to eradicate it.

‘Being an indigenous guard is a great responsibility in terms of the community and the territory. It is not just a matter of carrying the staff of office without commitment: there is a mission and it has to do with culture, with maintaining harmony in the community and maintaining harmony with Mother Earth.” – Indigenous elder, Cauca region

In the mountainous Cauca region of southwestern Colombia, nineteen different indigenous communities from the Nasa tribe (approximately 18.500 people) live their lives autonomously from Bogota’s centralized national government. Known for their organizational capacity and sense of community, the indigenous communities of the Cauca region have a history of popular resistance in Colombia. For example in the 1920s, the Nasa collectively boycotted the taxes imposed on them by the Governor of Cauca for living and working their own land. Also, the Nasa were the first indigenous tribe in Colombia to organize themselves in a regional council, the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC), in 1971.

With a new president’s approach to peace, Colombia faces old and new challenges for building peace. In a recent evaluation, Iván Duque searches to modify the peace agreement in three main areas: Land restitution and illegal crop eradication programs, the political representation of the FARC, and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP in Spanish). We analyze these changes through the lens of political polarization.

The Colombian Peace Agreement (CPA) is known to being the most inclusive peace deal to date, as several civil society organizations partook in the negotiation process and helped drafting the final agreement. Two years later into the peace building process, how inclusive is the implementation of Colombia’s peace? This article looks deeper into how Colombia’s national peace process relates to the existence of multiple grassroots initiatives in the country. Mainly, it explores how local and national peace building processes can complement each other.

This case describes a CLA approach in a highly conflict-affected region of northern Myanmar between 2013-16. A CLA approach was desirable in this area because it has highly fluid security, political, and humanitarian dynamics, and because access is restricted to international actors, and requires that all interventions are based on local knowledge and agency. The challenge that this case addressed was how local communities can sustainably drive their own peacebuilding and development outcomes with minimal international support, and in the midst of unpredictable and changing local dynamics. Using a methodology developed specifically for locally led change in complex environments – Systemic Action Research (SAR) – a consortium of local organisations designed and implemented activities that directly benefited more than 17,000 people and achieved several notable firsts, including the first ever provision of mine risk education to internally displaced people in this area, the introduction of anti-drug messaging in school curricula, legislative changes away from punitive and towards rehabilitation strategies for drug users, and the initiation of a track 2 dialog forum to support Myanmar’s peace process. Continuous learning, pause and reflect, and adaptive management processes as part of SAR formed the backbone of this initiative, which generated considerable insights for Adapt Peacebuilding, and lessons learned to share with the global peace and development communities. Lessons learned concerned factors that enable CLA approaches, as well as inhibitors, principally related to trust and uncertainty, which strain relations with donors and partners, and can constrain impact.

This work was produced and distributed ahead of the May 2017 national dialog process of Myanmar's peace process. Based on international comparative evidence drawn from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies Peace Accords Matrix, the animation addressed contemporary peacemaking challenges in Myanmar.

This presentation, hosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, explores the current state of peacebuilding in Myanmar as it relates to the peace process, intercommunal violence in the country's west, and the role of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. It draws distinctions between the appearance of change and much deeper conservative forces of military and political power that maintain the status quo. Effective peacebuilding requires more attention to these deeper forces and their interaction with more visible political and conflict dynamics.